SCRR Fall 2024 Network of Practice
Grief is the Medicine
November 14, 2024
10:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. CT / 1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET
This event has ended.
“Recovery can only take place within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”
—Judith Lewis Herman
Join us on November 14th, 2024 for our annual Fall Network of Practice, a space for the SCRR community to connect, resource one another, peer support, and build our collective wisdom.
The 2024 Fall Network of Practice focuses on our experience of recovery. In our project’s framework, we use Judith Herman’s three pillars of recovery from Trauma and Recovery (1992) to inform our programming: 1) Safety & Stabilization; 2) Remembrance & Mourning; and 3) Reconnection & Integration.
November 14th offers us a time to explore each pillar. In dialogue with ourselves and each other, we explore safety, remembrance and mourning, and integration so that our school crisis leadership is reflective, attuned, and grounded.
Our Flow
- 10:00 am – 10:30 am PT: Welcome & Community Connection with Leora
- In our opening, we’ll not only spend time familiarizing ourselves with each other. We’ll also have space to establish shared language for our recovery framework, unpacking Herman’s original frame and applying it to our current school leadership landscapes.
- 10:35 am – 11:15 am PT: Constructs of Safety with Leora and special SCRR network peer shares
- In our first session, we’ll explore how we as individuals construct the concept of safety, how it may remain the same personally in our professional realm or conflict, how to navigate when safety needs collide in our schools’ recovery practices and policies, and more. Learning will happen both in the main room and in breakouts.
- 11:25 am – 12:20 pm PT: Grief is the Medicine with Leora, Oriana, Bri, Kristi, Roberta, Camden and more
- Our Fall Network of Practice is titled, “Grief is the medicine” because this second pillar of recovery, mourning and remembrance, is the pillar most skipped over in school crisis recovery work. Here, we give it the most time in our day.
- You’ll be invited into affinity-based breakout groups of your choice to build our practice and skills for remembrance and mourning recovery work.
- Affinity group options include:
- BIPOC Educator Grief: A group specifically for those who identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Color facilitated by Oriana and Roberta
- Life After Loss: A group for anyone who wants to process, share and explore how to center our educator recovery after student death, loss of a school community, school closures, etc facilitated by Leora
- I Am Here and I Am There: A group for anyone who has their own immigration and refugee narratives with attention to those whose primary or preferred language is a language other than English. We explore how this experience is informing our ability to recover and lead recovery. This space centers the mourning of lost connection to community, culture, language, etc and is facilitated by Kristi
- Without Apology: A group for folks who identify as LGBTQ+ to share how you are creating spaces (or wanting to, dreaming to) that support Queer educator grief facilitated by Camden
- 12:30 pm – 1:10 pm PT: The New Normal- Reconnection with Bri and Leora
- In our final session, we map out moves, strategies, and leadership approaches that have helped us, our teams, and our communities reconnect with life after crises. In a whole group practice, we create a collective visualization of what want to stop doing, sustain, and start doing in our work that helps us move through the thing so that trauma doesn’t define us or our school community, so that we live with it and not by it.
- 1:15 pm -1:30 pm PT: Reflections, Meaning Making, and Close with Leora
- We end our day with integration and ways to process the learning, resource exchange, and conversations we held and how to bring them into our non-SCRR zoom life.
Session Materials
Who is this for?
Anyone who is interested in what school crisis recovery can mean, feel, and look like!
- Participants of any SCRR programming (coaching, consulting, communities of practice, Summer or Winter Institutes, workshops)
- Researchers, scholars, or academia who are interested in learning from practitioners
- Educators, school based mental health professionals, clinicians, youth advocates, family and caregivers, and school community members who have gone through big things (e.g., however you define “crisis”)
- Those involved in the crisis readiness and response continuum
- Anyone providing support to school systems and behavioral health systems (e.g., technical assistance organizations or entities)
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is this program eligible for Continuing Education Hours (CEH)? No
- Will this offering be recorded? No
- Who can I contact if I have additional questions? Email us at scrr [at] cars-rp.org with “SCRR Fall 2024 Network of Practice” in the subject line.
- Accessibility: This event will feature automated captions / live transcripts provided by Zoom.
Priming Resources
- Judith Herman’s three stages of recovery from severe trauma Stage 1
- Grounding Judith Herman’s Trauma Theory within Interpersonal Neuroscience and Evidence-Based Practice Modalities for Trauma Treatment
- Phases of Trauma Recovery
- School Mental Health – Crisis Leadership Lessons: Voices of Experience from Leaders in the Pacific Southwest Region
- Creating and Holding Space for Ourselves and Each Other After Student Death
- Honoring Grief – Invitations for Educators to Allow & Embrace Our Own Lived Grief Experiences, in the Classroom and Beyond
- Our Right to Grieve: Grief-Informed Recommendations and Resources
- Taking Pause: Holding Vigil for our Collective Grief
- Flowers in a Garden: Making space for grief and healing in our schools, in our classrooms, in ourselves – Reflections from a 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellow – an SCRR Voices from the Field Blog
- Getting to Our Grief: Utilizing Poetry to Metabolize Grief – an SCRR Voices from the Field Blog
Quotes from Fall 2023 Network of Practice participants
“As a participant/presenter, I was deeply grateful… for being in dialogue in our different professional and personal lenses.”
“The presenter I went to was incredible and had a lot of story telling and tid bits of empowering language I can bring back to my community.”
“[The conversation in the peer presentation I attended} was very enlightening and thought provoking. I appreciate the insights they offered.”
SCRR Faculty
Leora Wolf-Prusan Ed.D, (she/her)
SCRR Project Director
Leora Wolf-Prusan serves as the Project Director for the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project and as the School Mental Health field director for the Pacific Southwest Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (MHTTC), in addition to many other facilitation projects. Leora is dedicated to work focused on educator mental health, wellness, and trauma-informed approaches to education and operates through a framework in which public health, social work, and education intersect. Her research examined the impact of student death on teachers, what factors contribute to teachers building resiliency, and what supports teachers need from the school system in the event of a student homicide or other traumas. She received a BA in international relations and a BA in Spanish with a minor in Social & Ethnic Relations from the University of California, Davis; a teaching credential from Mills College; and an EdD in educational leadership from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Oriana Ides, MA, APCC, PPS (she/her)
SCRR Field Coach at Center for Applied Research Solutions (CARS)
Oriana Ides is the School Mental Health Training Specialist at CARS, who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice. She has worked with young people across life course from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director. She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.
Kristi Silva, MA, MS (she/her)
SCRR Senior Research Associate
Kristi Silva has over 15 years’ experience providing culturally responsive training and technical assistance – especially for Latine and Native American communities – at the local, state, and national level. In addition to subject matter expertise in health equity and policy, she is an experienced researcher and evaluator, with specialization in community-developed best practices requiring an adapted evaluation methodology. She was selected as a Health Policy Fellow for Pew Charitable Trust and AmeriCorps and has worked in partnership with communities impacted by pan-generational trauma to develop strengths-based policies and practices that are sustainable and rooted in a social justice framework. As a professional who now serves communities like her own, Kristi brings an essential lens of lived experience to the work.
Brianna Young, M.Ed (she/her)
SCRR Field Coach with Trauma Transformed
Brianna Young is a Midwest native, currently based in the Bay Area. Her role is a Lead Trainer and Project Specialist with Trauma Transformed, and serves as a Field Coach for the School Crisis Recovery and Renewal project. Having started her professional career as a middle school teacher and instructional coach, Brianna has a particular heart for schools and all the potential they hold. She obtained her Masters of Education from Concordia University, emphasizing Trauma and Resilience in Educational Settings. Brianna dedicates this work to teachers who view their classrooms as healing spaces, and to the students who walk through those doors.
Guest Faculty
Roberta Marguerite Chávez, MA (she/her)
Roberta Marguerite Chávez received a BA and MA in History from Stanford University, a graduate-level Certificate in Somatics from Saint Mary’s College of California, and a teaching certificate from Sacramento Waldorf School. She has danced and performed locally and in far-away places across oceans, taught in liberal arts colleges and universities, and formerly served as Faculty Chair at Golden Bridges School in San Francisco, CA. She is passionate about exploring the relationship between our individual and collective freedom. Roberta was a 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellow.
Camden Webb, MA (he/him)
Camden currently serves as the Clinical Services Director for the Solano County Office of Education. Within this role, he supports numerous mental health and wellness initiatives that focus on school communities in Solano. Additionally, he has a private practice where he specializes in providing therapy to LGBTQ-identified youth. Camden has years of experience in providing trauma-informed, attachment focused, culturally responsive counseling to individuals from diverse backgrounds. His passion is providing leadership to clinical teams who conduct intensive mental health work in high-need communities. Recognizing the reality of vicarious trauma and burnout, he leads with compassion, understanding, and a growth mindset that encourages personal and professional development of staff within the mental health field. Camden was a 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellow.
